New Galleries On Line

So, after months of someone hassling me I have finally got some galleries up on my own website. None of the software that’s available really does what I want it to. I had bad experiences with Coppermine, Gallery 2 is so bloated with foreign language stuff it’s unbelievable, Drupal has an Ajax image addon but I don’t need the CMS power that Drupal offers and the others I tried were crappy. I ended up going with a piece of software call jAlbum. It’s software that sits on your PC and creates the galleries from the images you tell it to. It then has an FTP Uploader to connect you directly to your hosting and upload the files. If you want to add galleries, no problem. Just throw them into the folder and tell the application to re-create the galleries.

I would like to get it running with the AJAX Lightbox 2 Javascript that’s available on the web. Indeed, there’s a jAlbum skin for it, but it’s not really polished and has a couple of issues:

There’s no option for different background colours. Currently it’s white or nothing.
If you click the image on the album, it pops the thumbnail up in the AJAX overlay.
There’s no navigation. This means that once you get into the sub-albums you can’t get back to the top level.

There are currently only a few of my pictures up, I still have about three years of DVD backups to go through, but I have put one wedding up. I have a couple more to go in too.

Currently you can see:

The Flikr Gunwharf Meet, January 2007
Random Mini Photos
Pancake Eating Freaks Galleries – Publicity shots and a gig from last November at the Wedgewood rooms
An HMS Warrior gallery
Matt & Becky’s Wedding
A Couple of shots from Titchfield Carnival last year.

Please let me know what you think of the galleries. For the geeks among you, if you know of any better gallery software that supports both albums and Ajax then please let me know!

Oh, the link: http://photos.cornellfinch.com

Collin on March 22, 2007 | Filed Under Words

6 Comments

Pete on March 22nd, 2007

jAlbum is what I used for upping my photos (that aren’t on Flickr), same skin too I think! It’s a great little app.

Daze on March 23rd, 2007

Yep, I like it. Quick and fairly easy to use. The navigation took me a little while to know where to go “back up”. From a photo page back to the album. From an album page back to the home, etc. But overall, nice.

Jonathan on March 24th, 2007

Hoooleeecow. That Jack Daniels bike is gorgeous. By the way, jAlbum is somewhere on the order of one magnitude faster than my Gallery2 install. I’m jealous.

Kate on March 25th, 2007

I would just be careful with what you put up, basically we’ve just had a telling off about taking photo of under 16’s without their parents permission.
I would also look at the legality of putting children up on a website if their parents do not know about it, just a small one but they were talking about it on Jeremy Vine as well.

But I am liking the photos :D

Collin on March 25th, 2007

Indeed, the laws protecting children and photography are a minefield. I had to look at some of this stuff for the weddings, so know a little.

You are not allowed to put any photo of an under 14 on the internet without their parents written permission.

I believe you can take photos of under 16s without parental permission as long as they are taken in a public place – for example on the street. At a private or invited event it is a different matter and you should get written permission, usually in the form of a model release.

The Scout Groups locally (as I believe do the schools) have to get written permission for taking photos at camp. If a parent refuses that permission then the leaders/helpers must be careful of where that child is when taking the photographs and make sure they are not in the shot. Even if they are not identifiable.

I will do some research into this as it is something that will affect my future business.

Thanks for the comments though folks! Jonathan – I thought that JD Harley was gorgeous too. If I could have afforded it I would have had it myself. I would have been scared to ride it though!

Pam on April 25th, 2007

Hey just to share with you an info about JAlbum,

Making a JAlbum directly web-accessible with Purplenova

Purplenova (www.purplenova.com) can make your JAlbum directly web-accessible from your PC. You no longer have to host the album with a ISP for your friends to be able to view it.

Simply drag and drop your JAlbum directory (Gigabytes?… no problem!) into Purplenova and pass a single URL to your friends. Your JAlbum remains with you, and pictures are streamed securely on demand when your friends access them through any plain Browser.

Detailed instructions are at:

http://purplenova.justdiscussion.com/Hosting-of-JAlbum-Album-f3/User-Guide-for-Hosting-the-JAlbum-through-Purplenova-30-t3.htm

Cheers,
Pam

Cornell Finch